"I'm going to come back to West Virginia when this is over. There's something ancient and deeply-rooted in my soul. I like to think that I have left my ghost up one of those hollows, and I'll never really be able to leave for good until I find it. And I don't want to look for it, because I might find it and have to leave".----Breece D'J Pancake, in a letter to his mother.

Kelli Anne Noftle

A picture of the junkyard at midnight. Shattered windshields heaped against awilderness. The desert won’t keep track of time but needs massive amounts ofenergy, spread across the badlands to appear casual. I’ve been wondering about youin three-dimensions. In glass, plastic, metal. I’ve been wondering if holograms arephotographs that never die. Somehow the image gets trapped inside. See? I’m in theempty lot with my door ajar. I’m tilting my credit card, looking for your face in amoving bird. We are only inches from a future. The adequate amount of space fordesolation is predetermined. There is a supermarket from one angle, a salvage yardon the horizon, twelve locusts and a jar of honey. What makes you different fromthe other? A composition compelling in its near obscurity? I’m not even allowed totalk about your ghost—

Civilization began with a tree, a week, a wind, a crawl, a rose, a bead of water, a jar, a movingbody, a river beside a tree, a river carrying semen and feces, a riverbank of cement holdingsemen and feces, a shopping cart, a plastic spoon, a gravel yard, a weekend, a woman wadingin a river, a woman who took forever to get there walking through semen and feces, a pathbeside a river that leads to a gravel field, a jar of water, a sick hot wind, a month of labor, atree shedding sand and needles, a labor pain, a woman crouched in the wind, a womancarrying his name and his face on a child in her arms, a desert of bones circling a yard, aspoon to scoop the child’s food, a knotty tree, a wind blowing rocks and needles, a long timewaiting for roses, a beginning, a spoon, a needle, a rosebud, a budding, a week, a circle, aname, a rose, an opening, a turning into, a parting, a woman, arose, arising, arise, begin, arise,begin to turn, turning, to a tree, to a rose, into a face, into a woman, in two parts, shed hisbody, carry his name to your grave.

Common examples include seeing animals or people in clouds or hearing hiddenmessages on records played in reverse. Sometimes the brain is almost too good atrecognizing faces. That time in Berkeley I kissed a woman who looked exactly likeAdam. You can’t develop a photographic memory but you can reconstruct the restof the head even if two facial features are the only attributes visible. A few beerslater, the modulation of light, your hair is different, you’ve gained weight, thesimplistic drawing of three circles and a line on the side of a building—who’s smile isthat? To understand holography, one can think of it as similar to recording wherebya sound field is encoded in such a way that it can be reproduced later without thepresence of the original. Remembering is repetition. That woman looked like no oneI knew, yet she was familiar. Remembering is confusion. Lines of graffiti. Despite thecomplete lack of resemblance to a real human face, I recognized someone. What’sthat called? A highly evolved survival trait? To render a faceless apparition, one mustcapture both the immaterial and the palpable. A skull in a rosebud. Jesus in a grilledcheese. Try to decipher which Adam. Holography is also a metaphor some physicistsuse to describe our ability to store memories in the universe. Forget the brain!Sometimes you have to face the music going backwards. Sometimes you must fill theface of the earth and subdue it. Face down, with anyone.

it begins prickly

aluminum tins

a cutting board stainedwith pomegranate seeds

a splintered twinge

an infestation

flies circling a jar

civilization is nota fork or spoon or

a rosea rose

it begins cloudy

a deserted composition

a maggot’s white ricebody twitching

flower stemsin water decomposing

do not mistake intrusionfor the luck of company

the face of a scarecrowin the garden

an empty pie pan

“I knew him as intimately as I knew my own image in a mirror. In other words, I knew him only in relation to myself. Yet, on those terms, I knew him perfectly. At times, I thought I was inventing him as I went along, however, you will have to take my word for it that we existed.” -Angela Carter, “A Souvenir of Japan”

My favorite souvenirs are from a writer/artist friend in the Marines who was deployed to Iraq for a few months in 2003. During his deployment, he sent me letters and drawings on scraps of cardboard and a single bougainvillea petal pressed inside a sheet of wax paper. He said the flower was from the only living plant in what once (supposedly) stood as the Hanging Gardens of Babylon. He wrote: “the rest is piled with rocks.”

Kelli Anne Noftle’s first book of poems, I Was There For Your Somniloquy, won the 2010 Omnidawn Poetry Prize. She lives in Los Angeles and sometimes makes music under the name Miniature Soap. www.kelliannenoftle.com